'Around the World in 80 Days' lifts off, but only just

There was little to make the 1956 movie version of Around the World in 80 Days a classic. It was essentially an excuse to showcase the (then new) widescreen format with nice landscapes and an all-star lineup (there were some 40 big-name cameo appearances).

As an extra bonus, it also showed just how easily Academy Award voters can be tricked into mistaking expensive gimmickry for art. It won best picture.

So this new, family-friendly adaptation of Jules Verne's novel can hardly be called a travesty. But it can't be called a very good movie, either.

It's produced by a company, Walden Media, that wants to educate while entertaining the little ones without alienating mom and dad. The film just kind of rolls along without building up much narrative momentum. Not exactly boring, even clever and exciting in fits and starts, the new 80 still proves that, in the Spy Kids 21st century, Victorian-era fabulism plays just as old as it sounds.

The producers have tried to make the antique seem cool. Their efforts, to borrow a phrase from another literary source, are quixotic.

They've turned Passepartout, the French sidekick of globe-trotting English gent Phileas Fogg, into an acrobatic Chinese thief played by Jackie Chan (成龍). Fogg himself is rather sweetly reimagined as a visionary, though slightly crackpot inventor. It's a characterization more in keeping with Verne's works like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and presented with a nice strain of vulnerability by Steve Coogan. He's a British TV comedian best known to movie audiences as 24 Hour Party People's punk rock impresario.

Chan, of course, has something of a child fan base, but that's mostly from TV cartoons (around the world, he's a much bigger movie star than he is here). How much of the pre-tween audience either of these guys are going to pack in is a pretty looming question mark.

Frank Coraci, who does Adam Sandler comedies, directs the movie, in which there are faint reflections of the earlier picture's cameo star galaxy. These range from the inexplicable, such as classy Oscar winners Jim Broadbent and Kathy Bates (well, she was in Coraci's Waterboy) to Rob Schneider (probably most kid-pleasing of the lot) to the sheerly loony last acting hoo-hah of California's current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger as a vain and horny Turkish prince.

This makes the movie feel like a commercially calculated project built from faulty initial formulas. Those youngsters who do go will learn many, somewhat inaccurate things about the late 19th century: Who the Impressionists were; what the Wright brothers' most significant contribution to manned flight was; where the Statue of Liberty came from; and more -- if they're still awake.

Oh, dear, I'm not making it sound like very much fun, am I? Well, 80 is definitely more fun than school.

It's certainly not the greatest Jackie Chan movie ever, but the kung fu clown does deliver some fine slapstick while hanging from a hot air balloon and choreographs some clever martial arts mayhem in Paris, India, China and New York. Fogg's numerous inventions have a certain overbuilt, paleo-futuristic charm to them. And the film looks nice.

European locations were filmed in and around Berlin, Asian settings in Thailand. Too much obvious CGI is used to establish many long-since-changed locales.